| A Moment of Jen | |||
posted by Jen at 1/29/2005 09:08:00 AM If the New York Times sent you, hello and welcome to my weblog! But first, one tiny point of clarification: I was a novelist before I was a blogger. I started Snarkspot years before the birth of my daughter Lucy, and about seven months after the publication of my first novel, GOOD IN BED. I kept it up through the writing, publication, and film adaptation of novel number two, IN HER SHOES, and alongside Novel Three, LITTLE EARTHQUAKES. So this isn't just an "online shrine to parental self-absorbtion." It's an online shrine to authorial self-absorbtion, too! You won't just read me complaining about morning sickness, stomach flus, truncated naps, and poopy diaper emergencies. Oh, no! You can read about morning sickness, stomach flus, truncated naps and poopy diaper emergencies on book tour. Nor will I just bitch about the baby. I'll also complain about the weather, the Mummers, sexist book reviewers, unresponsive New Yorker editors, foreign translators and my relatives' unwillingness to cough up the cover charge to hear me speak. Plus, read about my nanna's film debut! Enjoy! | # Friday, January 28, 2005 posted by Jen at 1/28/2005 02:55:00 PM I heard back from the New Yorker. Alas, I will not be gracing their pages with my prose. The email I got mentioned something about how they recently did a story that had elements in common with the piece I was proposing. Also, they like to keep their Talk of the Town pieces local, and Philadelphia is not New York (don’t you love it when the thanks-but-no-thanks comes complete with a geography lesson?) I’m disappointed, but I figure there’s a way to turn the lemon of rejection into the lemonade of advice. And so, herewith, How to Query the New Yorker (if you are a Female Writer of Popular Fiction who Does Not Look like Nell Freudenberg). Step one (1982-present): Gather courage. After all, this is the New Yorker we’re talking about, literature’s holy of holies! Step two: Get idea for “Talk of the Town” piece. Spend three hours honing single-paragraph pitch letter. Consult New Yorker’s website; email query, as suggested, to talkofthetown@newyorker.com. Mention your career as a journalist, name-check some of the more prestigious places you’ve been published, add titles of three novels. Step three (six weeks long): Nothing. Not a phone call, not an email, not even an autoreply saying that yes, the query arrived. Nothing. Step four: Email husband, attempting to convince him to pose as assistant, call New Yorker, ask for editor’s name so you can send query directly to him/her. Step four (a): Patiently explain to husband that yes, you know he is not actually your assistant, but that it won’t hurt him to pretend. Step four (b): Promise husband that yes, some day, should it become necessary, you will pretend to be his assistant, too, or anything else he wants, provided there are no handcuffs involved. Step five: Husband comes through! You have names! Actual names of Talk of the Town editor and her assistant! Send query off to them directly. Step six: Nothing. Nada. Niente. Rien. Step seven: After a week has gone by, call Talk of the Town assistant. Voicemail picks up. Explain who you are and that you’re calling to make sure she received your query and to feel free to call you with questions. Step eight: Paranoia. Decide that Talk of the Town assistant is twenty-two-year-old Brown graduate with size zero leather miniskirt and degree in semiotics who automatically shuns any book or short story with actual plot and unambiguous ending. Imagine Talk of the Town assistant as mean-faced girl from freshman year of college who corrected your pronunciation of “heinous” in front of a room full of classmates, including guy on whom you had a crush. Step nine: Google mean-faced girl from freshman year of college. Find out she now serves on board of major charitable organizations and has baby slightly younger than your own. Feel heinous. Step ten: After two weeks of non-responsiveness from miniskirted Gauloise-smoking Derrida-quoting assistant Talk of the Talk editor, and one very bad dream in which Eustace Tilly ignores you at the Sadie Hawkins dance, give up. Call your literary agent. Explain that you have this idea for a piece that you’d love to write for the New Yorker, that you’ve gone through all of the appropriate channels via email and phone calls and gotten nowhere. Can she help? Step eleven: The next morning, literary agent writes to David Remnick, editor in chief of New Yorker. Email mentions the fact that you attended Princeton (just like he did) approximately seven times, wisely gives the titles of your novels not at all. Four minutes later: Pay dirt! David Remnick emails literary agent. Single terse sentence contains instructions: send query directly to him and he will pass along. Huzzah! Tell literary agent you will name second-born in her honor. Spend giddy fifteen minutes swooning over hunkiness (and penetrating intellect, of course!) of David Remnick. Enjoy daydream in which you are married to David Remnick and you end each night with long, intellectual discussions about foreign events and domestic policy and similar. Suffer regret when you realize you have inadvertently taught twenty-month-old daughter the phrase “he’s dreamy.” Step eleven: Later that afternoon, email updated version of query first sent seven weeks ago directly to David Remnick. Strive for attitude of breezy good humor as opposed to less winning tone of pissed desperation. Step twelve (twenty-four hours later): Receive email from Talk of the Town editor saying that David Remnick passed along your query. Her email will not mention that she's heard from you before, but either way, the piece is not for them. And Philadelphia is not in New York. Step thirteen (ongoing): Convince yourself you didn’t want to write for those snobs anyhow. | # Wednesday, January 26, 2005 posted by Jen at 1/26/2005 05:07:00 PM Lucy's First Rule of the drop-in play group: All of the toys in this entire room are mine, until I lose interest. Addendum to Rule One If another child shows any interest in a toy I have abandoned, it's mine again. We had a little bit of drama over the busy box ("Bizzy Box! Bizzy Box! Oosie's turn! OOSIE'S TURN!") In our regularly scheduled playgroup, the teacher told us that toddlers her age don't understand the concept of sharing, but they do understand taking turns. As a result, Lucy has gotten quite adept at shouting "Oosie's turn!" Which means, in Lu-speak, "I want that now give it to me give it to me NOW NOW MINE MINE MINE!" Meanwhile, I'm completely addicted to Supernanny. Have you seen it yet? The first half of the show is devoted to kids running wild -- kicking, screaming, thrashing, hitting, biting, throwing and screaming some more while the hapless, drained-looking parents gnash their teeth and cry on Supernanny's shoulder. Then Supernanny lays down the law, writes up a schedule, and sets up -- this is my favorite -- the Naughty Stool. (Actually, it was the Naughty Stool for the first week; the Naughty Mat last Monday, and I believe that next week we're actually going to have a Naughty Room). In her deliciously clipped British accent, she kneels down in front of her young charge and says, "That behavior was unacceptable! You are going on the Naughty Stool!" And at the end of the hour, after the clueless parents manage to botch up Jo's plans and she returns (with video footage, in her specially imported British taxi!) to get them back on track, everybody's beaming and behaving themselves. It's wonderful to behold, but I suspect-slash-fear that the real reason I, and other mothers I know, like it so much is because of the pre-Supernanny portion of the program, where you can sit back in the comfort of your own living room, smugly marveling at how out of control other people's children are, and say, My kid would never -- while knowing full well that your kid probably will, or already has. (You also get the vicarious thrill of finding out what other parents are naming their children. This week was Brycie and Rylan. Next week, meet Chandler, Caden and Declan!) Meanwhile, is anyone else getting sick of the reviewers who seem astonished to learn that even though Curtis Sittenfeld is female and from the midwest and went to a New England prep school, her book about a midwestern female at a New England prep school is...made up? If I have to read another golly-gee-whiz profile expressing shock and awe that things young women write in novels did not necessarily actually happen to them, I'm going to chuck my copy of Everything is Illuminated at some smartypants editor's head. "Is it so easy to believe that I have no imagination and I can't invent dialogue or those scenarios?" Sittenfeld asks The New York Times. Sadly, that's been my experienced (although none of my books have gotten the kind of attention that Prep has). If you're a young male writer drawing from the well of your real-life experiences, the critics praise your imagination and inventiveness. If you're a woman doing the same thing, all they do is wonder whether you really gave your high-school crush a blow job, or if you really had a boyfriend who wrote for a magazine and said all of those terrible things about you. Sigh. | # Monday, January 24, 2005 posted by Jen at 1/24/2005 04:40:00 PM The little old lady has left the coffee shop. She seemed very disappointed that I was neither Dawn nor the lady who lives on American Street. I felt sorry I couldn't oblige. Meanwhile, it's snowing again. Gah. | # posted by Jen at 1/24/2005 02:51:00 PM A little old lady in a blue sweater and a gray beret just walked into the coffee shop and stared at me. "Dawn?" she said. "No," I said, smiling. "Oh! You look just like someone I know." I smiled, she shrugged, and went to get a cup of coffee. When I looked up, she was staring at me again. "Are you the lady from American Street?" she demanded. "No." "Huh!" More staring. "You look like two different people I know!" "And I'm just me!" I said. Anyhow, it's cold in the coffee shop, and the floor's all wet and slippery from melted snow, and my fingers are stiff and my brain feels half-frozen. We got about a foot of snow on Saturday, and yesterday it was too cold and windy to go out for long. Want to know how Lu and I have been whiling away our indoor hours? By tracing her foot on the Magnadoodle. "Foot! Toe! Draw!" Lucy will say, plopping her bare foot on the board. I'll trace. She'll giggle. I'll erase it, and the whole thing will start over again. Forty-five minutes of the foot on the Magnadoodle, accompanied by the sounds of "Mahna Mahna" on repeat. I hope this is our only blizzard this winter. In other news, I sent a query to The New Yorker, proposing a short, funny piece I'd like to do for them, and haven't heard so much as a "thanks but no thanks" email in response. So now, of course, I'm convinced that every editor in the place is sitting around wiping tears of hysterical laughter off of their cheeks at the thought of the author of GOOD IN BED writing for them. That they've posted my query on some communal bulletin board so everyone can stand around and making pithy, epigrammatic bon mots about the absolute hilarity of a chick lit author sullying their pages. That John Updike's made a special trip to Manhattan just to mock me. If only my paranoia could keep me warm... | # |
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